Free Yourself And Leave Resentment Behind

Resentment is like an anger that one cannot afford, a restrained hostility that traps the mind in an obsession. You think about the offense more than you would like and with astonishing detail; Those memories trigger a great inner malaise.

One may feel irritable or sad for no apparent reason or find oneself feigning enthusiasm for being around whom, in reality, one would rather forget.

Cynicism or sarcasm is used when talking about the alleged aggressor or the gesture is twisted in his presence or at his mere mention. That colors the look: one tends to see only the negative aspects of the other or not to remember their positive qualities or perhaps the good moments shared; instead, offenses are accurately remembered.

Resentment breeds a vicious cycle

If the impulse arises to return the damage received or imagined, it is soon perceived that there are better solutions. Keeping the problem inside feeds very frustrating and bitter feelings, a mixture of anger and sadness. Unleashing unease often casts a shadow over prospects …

Clearly, addressing resentment with the intention of healing it requires courage. But, at the end of the day, isn’t it a feat to abandon the role of victim and feel free and equal to others again?

Start point

Everything begins with an offense, a grievance, a contemptuous treatment or a humiliation. The starting point is an emotional wound that is added to others from the past that have not been resolved.

The fact itself is less relevant than the pain felt. The person may have been subjected to discrimination or ridicule, directly or indirectly disapproved or rejected, used or treated without regard.

Sometimes the trigger may be the fact of having been misinterpreted; others, not seeing an effort recognized. A common feeling is that of injustice, either directly or because others whom one considers to have worked or sacrificed less are more successful.

Be that as it may, there is always a wound at the source of and underlying resentment. It is true that it is often difficult to see, but resentment is nothing more than a human expression of deep emotional pain.

A pain that enslaves

Sometimes anger, frustration, the feeling of injustice or the feeling of loss find no way out. You cannot react because you should not, it is not strategically acceptable, you cannot, you do not dare, you do not know how or you are simply afraid to do it.

This means that the situation, or the emotion to be exact, is not resolved and, therefore, becomes chronic. To some extent, resentment is like a virus that rots everything up over time. Some claim that it is the only negative emotion that one cannot afford.

The other destructive emotions can be channeled, cooled or overcome, but resentment grows and worsens over time, keeps emotional wounds open and embitters one’s own existence and that of others. If it is not transcended, it leads to hatred and violence or the most self-destructive of sadness.

The same thing happens with resentment as with physical wounds: they hurt more if they occur before the previous ones have healed. Or that with the immune system: it reacts faster if it has been previously sensitized.

When resentment has started to take its toll

Then the grievances are experienced with more intensity and, at the same time, a greater tendency develops to take situations, words or gestures as offenses that did not have that intention or that another person would not take as such.

Without wanting to, expressing it or not, you are jumping to. The look tends to become more egocentric; that is, to personalize everything – taking it more seriously than normal – to think that others are judging you, observing you and drawing negative conclusions about your way of being or acting.

If the person compares himself more and more with others, he can imagine that he is considered inferior in some facet, which fuels his feeling of exclusion. The thought seems “black or white”, more radical and without nuances: “either they agree with what I say or they are against me.”

As resentment gains ground, it begins to interpret what happens around it with the greatest influence of social stereotypes, preconceptions or phenomena that occurred in the past and that have not been fully digested. In addition, there is a tendency to see others as the sole responsible for their own pain and to expect restitution or compensation that, when not given, increases resentment and pain.

Neither fear nor hostility

Together with all this, the inevitable fear floats, which can be expressed like this: ” How can I protect myself from this hostile world? How can I trust the one who caused me so much damage? If I open myself to others, I am left exposed; if not I do it, I feel left out… “.

It is clear that when faced with an aggression or a clear offense, you have to react: ask for explanations, express the evil inflicted, protect yourself, set limits … And in the most complex situations, in which it is not clear if it is a misunderstanding or in a way subtle abuse, one must be able to check what has happened and to analyze it with some perspective.

But situations that lead to resentment are distinguished by the fact that anger, disappointment, or regret find no avenues of resolution and suffering becomes corrosively stagnant. At the origin, the organism has been mobilized making available all the energy necessary for the attack.

The suffocation of our social part

Faced with an experience of aggression, the biological thing is to feel anger and hostility. However, letting oneself be carried away by it would further complicate things, either by entering into a spiral of attacks and counterattacks, by giving arguments to those who might brand one as unbalanced or by leading, sooner or later, to social isolation.

But, above all, fueling hostility also contributes to stifling the social and resilient part that we all carry within. That ends up being much more serious if possible, because it impoverishes the personality and, with it, the skills to face difficulties.

At the other extreme, flight, as a form of non-confrontation, reduces self-esteem because it increases the feeling of helplessness and the feeling of having a poor and fragile personality, which, on occasions, leads to more or less important depressive states. The flight encourages fear, which paralyzes or lengthens the processing of the experience, the digestion of pain.

Both fear and unresolved hostility catapult us into resentment and fuel it. This is why you don’t have to choose between the two. Resentment is not resolved in any of these ways – the situation may be, but not the feeling. The only way to solve the dilemma is to give it up.

Resentment cannot be overcome: it is welcomed, understood and thrown overboard! To a certain extent, when you look at it head-on, with an open attitude, you discover that it comes off more easily than expected … and the light can reappear.

The paths to liberation

An offense or injury cannot always be avoided. But what is within your reach is to heal your own wound, try to prevent future aggression and resolve your resentment. Taking on the challenge of increasing one’s psychological resistance contributes to making resentment more difficult to take root and multiply. That implies going through different growth paths at the same time. Let’s look at some of the most useful ones.

• Increase assertiveness and personal safety. The ability to express our own needs or what has hurt us increases the sense of control that exorcises resentment. Self-confidence sifts the need for external assessment to levels with which one can comfortably coexist.
• Improve social skills, especially with regard to the keys to personal communication. Listen, ask, check what one has understood, the more the better!
• Control egocentricity, whether it derives from a superiority or inferiority complex, which amounts to the same thing. Physical or mental pain makes us self-centered, and a very self-centered gaze increases the propensity to take everything personally.
• Open your mind to others. In practice it means closing your mouth more and opening your ears wide. When someone listens to the stories, the experiences of other people, their perspective is broadened. Striving to come into contact with people of different origins and with very diverse personalities helps to relativize, to give one’s experiences the importance they have, neither greater nor less.
• Remember that all people seek the same broadly: to be happy and avoid discomfort and pain. Shapes and styles change but, in essence, we are much less different than we sometimes think.
• The ability to collaborate is what has allowed the human species to go so far. No human being can live in isolation. Nothing that each individual has around him would have been possible without the direct or indirect collaboration of other people. And this is one of our challenges: to continue developing the ability to cooperate by nurturing innate qualities such as altruism and compassion that, in themselves, eradicate resentment by nipping it at the root.

10 keys to lighten the ballast

To free yourself from resentment, you must first be aware of its pitfalls and renounce its supposed advantages. This cannot be done without a great deal of courage that begins with taking care of yourself. All this requires:

1. Accept the pain you feel. You have to recognize the wound, look at it head-on and welcome it.
2. Take the time to recover and distance yourself.
3. Taking as a mere hypothesis that requires verification any conclusion about the intentions or motives of the other person.
4. Remember that the more you know someone, the greater the risk of misinterpreting their actions or judging them based on preconceived ideas or influenced by the past.
5. Take on the challenge of asking the other directly for the reasons for their actions or words; take a deep breath and listen carefully to their responses with a genuine willingness to understand.
6. When one is emotionally calm enough to express clearly and directly how one has felt about the other’s actions.
7. Try to adopt the points of view of all the people involved and even perceive the points of confluence between your own perspective and that of others.
8. All of the above does not exempt you from taking measures to protect yourself from future attacks or damage.
9. Review beliefs. Highly polarized or stereotyped thoughts, a tendency to take things too personally, or excessive personal sensitivity are generally poor advisers.
10. Agreement with the other is not needed to let go of resentment. The decision to look ahead, despite and with injuries, depends only on oneself.

Always trust in your essential ability to get ahead and find creative ways to overcome obstacles. Whoever believes in himself and his own ideas without becoming too attached to them manages to keep an open mind to perceive, understand and respect the value of those of others.